The Ocean Wave Scientists Thought Was Impossible | What the Physics?!

20 years as a sailor and I've seen several rogue waves. None were quite as big as 84 feet, but were substantially larger than the waves at that time. Once, in 1982 on a trip across the Pacific on a small tanker, we were running into waves 12-15 feet. A rough enough ride on a 300 foot long ship, but the bow stayed dry. And then, while I was closing a fire hose locker that had come open, the watch officer blasted the ship's horn, and pointed to a wave significantly larger. They turned the ship to try and hit the wave head on, and I started to race aft. Just then the bow fell out from under me as it dove into the trough ahead of the coming rogue wave, and I was floating in the air. I caught my foot on the railing, and was able to pull myself down to the deck, just as the wave hit, driving the bow up and into it. The water surged over the bow, and snatched me up, washing me down the length of the tank deck, crashing into tank tops and deck cleats as I went. I was badly bruised and cut up, but didn't break anything. We estimated the wave at 50 feet, about four times larger than average. But I guess NOAA thought it was just a sea story.

In 2007, I had remote cameras on the dune by the beach in Florida to record sea turtles hatching. The sea was calm, the tripods were at least 15-20 feet above sea level and 100 yards from the surf. Suddenly, I saw water rushing toward the cameras and the infrared lights went dark. After running to the beach, I found all my equipment trashed, much of it dragged way down the beach toward the surf and the sand was wet all the way into the dune. One huge wave came ashore and wiped everything out. I continued doing this for about ten years without another event even close to that.

Following ship history and logic, I'll call my next large ship "the most sinkable" in history. Then it'll probably just fly everywhere.

Athena is an excellent presenter. More of her, please.

If you want your boat to sink, just call it unsinkable..

Rogue Wave - Specializing in stealth, speed, and precision. Skills include sleight of hand, sneak attack, and perception 🌊 🗡️

RIP 28 sailors of the München

Athena Brensberger, what an awesome name!

Sailors knew rogue wave existed for hundreds of years but scientist dismissed them because, "those guys were drunk or something"

Maybe they should never call any ship no matter how big it is "unsinkable" cause they'll always sink!

Athena is a godess

"freaque" appears in the scientific article title at 2:57. I thought that was some crazy typo, but turns out that is a somewhat common slang term in oceanography term combining freak and rogue.

Back in the day, I spent a few months sailing the southern ocean in a 33' sailboat and those video clips of large seas really brought back memories (nightmare?). I'm also a retired engineer and know that water is subject to the laws of physics, and because they are a wave phenomena, constructive and destructive interference applies so they can be either larger or smaller than the average wave height.

As a layperson the thought of rogue waves being impossible never existed in my mind. When you consider the near-infinite combination of different waves across massive oceans, over differing elevations and terrain, with seismic events and the chaos of weather, you would think rogue waves at the very least were *assumed* possible prior to detection in the '90s. If anything, I guess this is one example of why tall tales can be harmful to society. Strange to think that even back in the days of sailing, societal nonsense filters were already overloaded with tales of mermaids and wrathful kraken; so rogue waves were also dismissed as delusional, rum-driven sailor talk. I wonder which modern phenomenon is our equivalent of a rogue wave, and by that I mean legitimate, aberrate events that have been drowned out by the thousands of crackpot claims and conspiracy theories covering everything from Bigfoot to UFOs, and more.

In the 80s two of us families were picnicking on west coast of Vancouver Island on the beach. A huge wave engulfed us all sweeping a hundred feet behind us up the sloping beachfront. Toddlers and coolers, beach chairs floating in every direction. I was a non believer in rogue waves until that day and am still to this day awestruck when I think about it.

A work colleague of mine was captain of a oil supertanker at one point. He ended up becoming an ISO auditor, checking mining and manufacturing operations for compliance, after he encountered a rogue wave at sea. He estimated that it was 75 - 80 feet high, and it damaged a causeway 120 off the waterline. He didn't want to press his luck, hence the career change.

4:15 I'm from now on going to call breaking waves "second-order bound nonlinearities".

One of my parents had a novel about a surfer titled "The Ninth Wave" which proposed that a surfer counted the waves.....the ninth being the largest, and the ninth ninth wave being the largest. The premise speaks to collecting waveforms, which is a subject which was hard to study before common electronic supercomputers.

The legend of the Ninth Wave. Surfers have talked about periodicity in the ocean for generations. Talk to "indigenous inhabitants", maybe?

In audio systems and electrical systems when the frequency of waves from 2 or 3 different sources end up in the same exact moment whether it is the Crest or Valley, this will definitely amplify the outcome, this can also be when a water wave 'harmonic' which is a different frequency or time period of wave enters the same stream of the wave and will definitely amplify that wave at that given time and combine to propagate with more energy, this is similar to feedback in audio systems or overload of an electrical system during that moment.